Nicolas Fréret

Nicolas Fréret (French: [fʁeʁɛ]; 15 February 1688 – 8 March 1749) was a French scholar.

He was born at Paris on 15 February 1688. His father was procureur to the parlement of Paris, and destined him to the profession of the law. His first tutors were the historian Charles Rollin and Father Desmolets (1677-1760). Amongst his early studies history, chronology and mythology held a prominent place.

To please his father he studied law and began to practise at the bar; but the force of his genius soon carried him onto his own path. At nineteen he was admitted to a society of learned men before whom he read memoirs on the religion of the Greeks, on the worship of Bacchus, of Ceres, of Cybele, and of Apollo. He was hardly twenty-six years of age when he was admitted as pupil to the Academy of Inscriptions. One of the first memoirs which he read was a learned and critical discourse, Sur l'origine des Francs (1714). He maintained that the Franks were a league of South German tribes and not, according to the legend then almost universally received, a nation of free men deriving from Greece or Troy, who had kept their civilization intact in the heart of a barbarous country. These views excited great indignation in the Abbé Vertot, who denounced Freret to the government as a libeller of the monarchy. A lettre de cachet was issued, and Freret was sent to the Bastille.

During his three months of confinement he studied Xenophon, the fruit of which appeared later in his memoir on the Cyropaedia. From the time of his liberation in March 1715 his life was uneventful. In January 1716 he was received as associate of the Academy of Inscriptions and in December 1742 he was made perpetual secretary. He worked without intermission for the interests of the Academy, not even claiming any property in his own writings, which were printed in the Recueil de l'academie des inscriptions.

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